Through the bathroom wall

Steve looked in the mirror, and grimaced. He hated his hair in the morning; it took a comb, water and a ridiculous quantity of gel to mould it into something acceptable to the rest of Year 6. His mother used to help him, but now she worked. Every morning was the same: Steve got up when his mother called ‘Bye, love!’ and the front door banged. She had dressed, washed, cooked, kissed him awake and turned on the radio for him. And then he was alone. His breakfast was on the table; his lunch was on the microwave. His father had gone to work eight months before, and still hadn’t come home, but Mum wasn’t worried “He’ll be back. He promised”.

A movement in the mirror. A noise behind him. Steve swung round. The back of his neck felt cold, his ears were burning. He had seen something, just for a second. He picked up his deodorant, flew out of the door shouting ‘Ha!’ and pointed the spray at....no-one. He stood listening intently, breathing as silently as possible. Nothing. He looked at his feet and laughed quietly. “Stupid!”. He had always been terrified of intruders, but his father used to be there to protect him. Now he felt vulnerable. He looked at Dad’s toothbrush which was still sitting in its place.

Suddenly, a voice. “It was only me, don’t worry”. Steve jumped so high, he thought his heart had come out of his mouth. She was sitting on the edge of the bath, looking at him. Her purple eyes burned with a yellow light. “Close your mouth and follow me. We have things to do,” said......said who? Steve stared at the creature in front of him in his bathroom! She had broad shoulders, impossibly long, fluid legs, and scales, like a fish, on her arms and cheekbones. But what made her the strangest, most beautiful creature Steve had ever seen was her colour: turquoise, like tropical waters and mint ice-cream. And she was carrying a battle-axe.

‘Are you coming?’ she asked impatiently. ‘How can I argue with a huge, beautiful green woman with an axe?’ thought Steve and nodded weakly. The ‘woman’ swung round and jumped through the bathroom wall, as if it was a waterfall. As Steve stepped cautiously through the liquid tiles, he heard her voice ‘By the way, I’m your sister.’

Illustration by Roberto Miranda

The Art of Being Different: Part Two

Part two: Your wee bit hill and glen

England. School and teachers in Southern England in the 1970s. Where to start? I arrived in Bray, in South East England with four years of primary school still to go, those years stretching out (and up) in front of me like a slippery ladder to be climbed a rung at a time, with Mr Bennett and his Top Class hovering way above me. Most of the things I learned in the first two years were not on the syllabus, and began with the discovery that nearly all my classmates either sounded remarkably like the gentleman who announced the football results before tea on Saturdays, or as if they had a mouthful of gobstopper-like vowels crashing together and pulverising the consonants. Even my name was no longer familiar, becoming something akin to the noise emitted by a cat yowling in the night.

Say my name, go on, say my name...  Image by @cerirhiannon at eltpics

 Braywick, my new house of learning, was a red-brick building which had presumably been home to the village school since the early Victorian era, and so was a clutter of overspill huts and bicycle sheds by the early 1970s, with one of the original classrooms doubling as the two-sitting dinner-hall with “food” delivered by the Council in large stainless steel tins, pails and urns which was consumed with noses held to aid swallowing. I'm still unsure as to whether school lunches or school toilets were the worst aspect of the day-to-day at Braywick...

The playground was small and hampered by its makeshift classrooms, but it was on the edge of Braywick Park, with the forbidden 'Dell', and expanses of grass that doubled as the rounders pitch (God-forsaken game that could only have been invented by the English to torture poor wee, waif-like lassies like myself). The park was full of fairies, elves, witches, trolls, vikings and unicorns; there were monkeys in the monkey-puzzle trees, galloping around on the stallions that lived amongst the leaves of the horse-chestnut trees. The fairies rode on sycamore propellers and wore magnolia flowers edged with the seed fluff that came from the plane trees. You could lie in the long grass under the willow and weep, while catkins jumped down from the pussy-willow to spit at the bullies and Chipper-riders and keep them at bay.

The Chipper. A Chopper for midgets. In Scotland we'd had sensible bikes and trikes sporting the Raleigh coat of arms – a blue trike had cast me as Lieutenant Blue in neighbourhood games, and had been succeeded by a red bike (with just one stabiliser), crowning me Captain Scarlet just too late to enjoy my reign back in Mosshead Road. But here, the children had Chippers and Choppers, bright yellow or orange, with streamers on the handlebars, and they seemed to be for showing off, making ruts in the park grass or spraying gravel at rivals, rather than for playing. It didn't look promising.

It was in the park that I learned to shut up, and my awareness of being different suddenly took on Gargantuan dimensions. To this day I spend most of my time silent, then overwhelming people with incessant blah when the valve on the pressure cooker pops. I learned to be silent thanks to technology, just for the record. Our teacher, Mrs. Weatherall, was a fine teacher in true 70s style - and believe me, the 70s were far more educationally sound than the present day, as creative writing, projects and art seemed to dominate the curriculum, or at least in Mrs. W's classes (though as I write I wonder if this was her way of dealing with me, bird of a different plumage, who could already read and write well, unlike most of her charges).

Mrs. W. decided we were going to do a class project on trees, possibly inspired by an educational radio programme we listened to weekly, so she took us to the park with drawing paper, pencils and a new fangled, battery-operated box which was fitted with a handle at one end, a spring-loaded lid and a microphone, and as we walked through the park in a group, each child was invited to describe a tree to this box. My turn came as we stood under a mighty lime tree. “It looks like a spook dancing.”

Image by Diarmuid Fogarty at eltpics

Back in our hut-class, the tape was played back to eager ears and most of our delight – none of us had ever heard our own voices before – and...well. Imagine plummeting off a cliff. I can still hear it, so utterly different from my classmates' voices, starting high and rolling downhill to the inevitable bounce on “dance-sing”, every vowel foreign, every syllable drawn out. I disappeared.

Shortly afterwards, it was decided that I was in the wrong class, as my years in Scotland had armed me with literacy skills and a general knowledge that were sinking me into the mulch of boredom as I waited for my new chums to plough through their Ladybird books and sums. Consequently, I was moved up a rung, across the playground and into Hell. Or at least Purgatory. Most of my new classmates were not at all amused by my arrival, young upstart who obviously didn't know my place, hardly spoke, seriously needed to grow to be on their level and wore bobbles, rather than the more mature 'Alice band'. I was a tadpole, they were frogs – how could I possibly be as clever as them? I sat in the back corner, by the window, which quickly became my escape route from tedium and harshness, and I did manage to make a friend or two, but then there was the matter of Miss Robertson* (*name changed).

Beware.....   Image by @amandalanguage at eltpics

I had been lucky with my teachers until then, starting with my own mother and Miss Campbell and leading up to Mrs Weatherall. They had all been kind but firm, no-nonsense, wholesome, creative, supportive and calm figures. Even the colours they had worn were indicative of a professional togetherness, through pale blues and warm rusts to gentle greens and heather tones. Women who had spent Friday afternoons in the hairdresser under a heated space helmet and Sunday evenings watching The Onedin Line. Women who probably ate boiled potatoes during the week but experimented with Robert Carrier at weekends. Miss Robertson was a different kind of fish. She was young, with long, dark hair scraped back into a ponytail, large dark eyes and would have been attractive I imagine, had she not been so intensely angry. All the time. At something only she could see. Dressed in black, white and a bitter shade of green, she shrieked, she shouted, she threw pencils and chalk, and she scared the living daylights out of me. I had been moved from my new class with my new friends, including the wonderful, beautiful Ally, an American who had introduced me to the word ketchup, maple syrup, strawberry-flavoured chewing gum, Sesame Street and Catholics, to a room with bigger, disdainful children (the boys particularly scary and huge) and a screaming, almost-pretty harpy at the front. One day, while attempting to stick the peeling sticky-back plastic back onto a story card, I was lifted from my seat by my fringe and told I would spend lunch-time wiping and repairing all the story cards. I was aghast. No questions, just yank the hair and punish. My trust in teachers began to disintegrate, despite an apology after several classmates waylaid Miss R at playtime and explained to her that I had been mending not destroying. From then on, I felt on edge, in the same room as a wildcat; you never knew when it would strike. My silence deepened along with my distrust, I rarely answered questions and became accustomed to the sharpness of her tongue. When we did fun activities, interesting topics, when she tried to be friendly – which she did, particularly after a second eye operation saw me sporting an adhesive fabric eye patch on my 'good eye' once again, a patch which my classmates begged turns to rip off at 12 o'clock every day, making me instantly popular for as long as the patches lasted, at least as a play-thing – when Miss R tried to smile and show me she was indeed human, I raised an unpatched eyebrow and burrowed further into myself. Still waters.

That summer, after a year at Braywick, the council sold our school to a prep school for wealthy Chaps in grey blazers and caps, and we upped and moved, lock, stock and two smoking etcs to Oldfield County Primary, about two miles down the road on the furthest edge of Bray. Oldfield was a brand spanking new place (though spanking was not allowed) with not a hut or mature tree in sight, but kitted with an outdoor swimming-pool, a separate playground for infants, a kiln, a proper art-room, an assembly hall and kitchens. The windows were big, the reading areas book-lined and carpeted and the tables semi-hexagons to allow for a variety of groupings. There were big open-plan areas and quiet rooms, 'seed-tray racks' instead of desks, and the toilets were for humans. In this open, see-all layout, although we had class teachers – me with the dreaded Miss Robertson again – hair-pulling was eliminated from our day and shrieking was limited to lessons in the quiet room... (pause for the irony to catch). We also had lessons with the other teachers in our area, so the much-loved Mrs Weatherall came back into my life. I fell in love with art, pottery and reading, we could sit on the floor or lie on our tummies during reading time, a time for hiding in stories uninterrupted, and story-time at the end of the day with a teacher reading to us was a delight.

A happy place to be.   Image by @mkofab at eltpics

Only a few lessons were of the teacher-and-blackboard-fronted sort – generally those showing us how to do something, as information came from cards or books and was read and copied or drawn – and creativity, experiments, stories and hands-on learning dominated. We progressed at our own pace, ticking off work on a chart as we completed it, and the teachers were free to monitor and help. As I moved into Upper Juniors a year later, things changed again. All the children in the two year groups were mixed and divided between three classes, so that each had a mix of ages, instantly eliminating my 'difference' on that front. Oh joy. I spent a year with Mrs Chown, who was nice but often ill, so we had several supply teachers and teacher trainees, most of whom were either wonderfully arty, sciency, musical and innovative, or someone's mum. We drew, we wrote poems, we painted, we made things from coloured crepe and tissue paper, we wrote stories and plays, we sang, we read, and our work turned the school walls into a myriad splurge of rainbow. In assembly on Mondays, every child with a birthday that week was called to the front and the entire school sang to them; exceptionally good poems or stories were read out from time to time and to date one of my only moments of literary glory was having an exceedingly long story I'd written and illustrated read out by the Headmaster, the appropriately named Mr Bray.

School lunches were edible and cooked on site, engraving the smell of boiled cabbage and gravy on my memory forever, and on special days we had lime milkshake and shortbread as an extra. There were dinner dances, cheese and wine dos and jumble-sales for the grown-ups, and we jiggled and jumped to The Kenny, Mud, The Sweet, Showaddywaddy, Suzy Quattro, Slade and Slik at school discos and made hats and masks for competitions.

Of course, as a thin, freckly, funny-sounding kid with a squint and a tendency to silent dreaming, whose Mum cut her fringe and made her clothes despite living in Bray with neighbours such as Gerry Anderson, the Boughs, Parkinsons and Wogans, life was not all roses. Particularly as I played with brainy boys rather than any variety of girl, wrote plays rather than learn the mind-boggling complexity of French skipping, and just wasn't interested in being like the rest. But life beside the Thames had its charm and cycling home at top speed through the Fisheries, no homework, birthday parties, and playing like wild children with the few co-oddball friends I did have made up for everything else.

My last year at primary was ruled over by the stern but fair Mrs Everton (quick to point out that if anything, she was a West Ham fan), a slightly anachronistic, angular, beige-haired lady who smelled of soap and maiden aunts, and was charged with revealing to us the secrets of joined-up handwriting, cartridge pens and long division, the intricacies of the five senses and the capital cities of European countries – Paris, Rome, Bonn... Mrs Everton was not too tolerant of my tendency to live in a dream world and seemed to treat me with extra sharpness. However, it turned out there was a reason for this, and one that was going to change my whole world big-time. She had decided that I was Intelligent and that a privileged brain like mine should not go to waste at the local comprehensive, well-known only for its poor academic standards and for being all girls.

So it was decided. I was to have private classes at Mrs Everton's house to train me for the 11-Plus and the entrance exam I was destined to take, in the hope that I would attend THAT secondary school which was deemed more appropriate to my intellect. Private classes in Mrs Everton's home! With tea and biscuits and endless IQ tests, comprehension exercises and arithmetic problems. Suddenly I was a hero, brave enough to enter the dragon's lair and still turn up for school the next day! And popularity tasted good.

The winter before I left Oldfield and the care of Mrs Everton, who I'd actually grown to like and who had turned my love of stories into an addiction, taking me from The Magic Flowerpot and The Kingdom of Carbonell to the more mature The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, Elidor, Stig of the Dump and others, I took the entrance exam to a school in Reading – a promising name for a town, I thought at the time, haha. A school without boys, male teachers or freedom. A school with a green uniform, as many rules for teachers as for students, a reputation for academic excellence (as well as for lesser gifted girls whose parents could donate library buildings and assembly halls) and a Headmistress called Hardcastle.
Oh boy.

Bird of a different plumage (tho more duckling than swan, perhaps?)   Image by @naomishema at eltpics

The Art of Being Different

How did I become a teacher? I was asked this a few weeks ago and have been scratching my head while losing sleep to thought and notebooks ever since. The straight answer is: by accident. But there are those who don't believe in accidents or coincidence and, besides, a two-word story doesn't achieve much, doesn't require me to exorcise (or indeed exercise) any demons. So rather than stop at those two words, I've been wandering around the grooves in the walnut that is my mind, looking for the answer to another question: Why had I always been so adamant that I'd never EVER be a teacher?

Life is a garden, and the path we take to arrive at the present, to find our vocation, is not only sinuous and forking like some Borgesian labyrinth, but it is overhung with heavy, gnarled, lichen-covered branches waiting to whop you on the head as your ducking skills fail you. And you never know if you're going to be lucky; sometimes those bumps loosen fruit or blossom which land conveniently in your outstretched hand, but, at least in my case, more often than pears and pomegranates, I was left with big, blue bruises and bugs in my hair. Schools and teachers. Good grief.

Still. Standing up here looking down from the height of decades, I see a constant theme overshadowing the path, marking it out as the route I followed. From early on, I was given a role by those around me in cahoots with circumstances, and then went on to insist on playing that role, turning it into an art: the Art of Being Different. 

(Photo by Chiew Pang for eltpics)

Part one: Oh flower of Scotland

My time at nursery school was brief but it introduced me to Topsy and Tim, attempting to colour inside the lines, pom-pom making, the fact that not all twins are identical, and a sector of Glasgow society that watched fillums and drank milluk. Whilst my accent and I were from the West End / University areas of Glasgow, this was Drumchapel. If you were to make a film (or fillum) set in Drumchapel in the late 1960s, you'd need leaden skies and balls of tumble-weed blowing across the barren grey nothingness between dreary blocks with their colour-coded front doors and probable abandoned shopping trolleys. You'd also need a burst of Ennio Morricone at his whistling best and maybe Gene Hunt could screech through in a Hillman Hunter. Yes.

No. The truth of it is that what Drumchapel also introduced me to was dysentery, so my milluk-drinking nursery school experience was curtailed, to be replaced by a long period of quarantine and home-schooling.

Primary school was, initially, as primary school should be. Thanks to having been shut away from other children and from most adults apart from my teacher mother for five or six months, I already knew how to write passably, read well and work out how many Smarties I'd have left in my hand if I ate three orange ones. I also knew who the Beatles were (and Herman and his Hermits, for that matter), how to make collages, chocolate crispies and meatballs, the names of all the flowers and birds to be seen in our garden, I knew hundreds of stories from around the world, the few French lyrics to 'Michelle' and all the words to Lilly the Pink. Life was sweet, the future looked bright and my new school uniform was exciting in its novelty.

In fact, life was not only sweet; it was safe and normal, and centred on a large, grey stone building, a soaring island set in the middle of a seemingly vast playground, an ark which the long-dead architect had wisely thought to equip with two main entrances, the words BOYS and GIRLS in foot-high chiselled stone letters above the doorways, in order to pre-empt chaos in the cloakrooms. Thus we stood in two straight lines between the first whistle and the second, girls separated from boys and ne'er the twain should meet ’twixt playground and classroom – apart from the day we joined forces to chant We want Scooby-Doo over and over again, to the chagrin of all adults from headmaster to janitor, in protest at the announcement by the BBC that our favourite episode-long cartoon (a brand new concept then) was coming to the end of its first season.

School life consisted of mittens on elastic that ran up one coat sleeve and down the other, black slip-on gym-shoes smelling of canvas and rubber, punishment by means of the belt (never experienced but witnessed once), wobbly teeth that appeared embedded in playtime apples, and teachers who looked like teachers should and knew where sugar came from and how to weave bookmarks. The very first thing I learned at primary school was how to knot my tie, and then that the cat sat on the mat, and you do sums and timeses with rods (which are not for putting in your mouth, Janet, pet), and this is how you tie shoelaces and bows, and o'clock half past o'clock half past, and you need a short piece of string for your handmade sugar mouse (but you don't eat the string, Janet, pet) and you can mix red, blue and yellow with each other to make other colours. Oh, and squeezy bottle paint smells funny and gets stuck in hair, and play-doh tastes better than plasticine.

Fancy a taste? (Photo by Ian James for eltpics)

Other early achievements included building an Apollo moonshot from Ski yoghurt pots, washing-up liquid bottles and toilet rolls, Santa's snow-topped log cabin from corrugated paper and cottonwool, and a whole town from variety pack cereal boxes. Parents were less impressed by this last project as variety packs were more than a bit above most people's budget. Dumbartonshire in the late sixties was mince and tatties country with a bit of fish on Fridays, and a small packet of jelly tots or dolly mixtures when your maiden aunts took you to the cinema. Vietnam was – via a circuitous route – affecting the shipyards and homes were not flush. Besides, we were Presbyterian.

The second year at Bearsden Primary, the names of my classmates rang strong and true, like granite and ice: Gregor, Kenneth, Graham, Donald, Andrew, Neil, Heather, Hazel, Gail, and Lindsay, with Nicola and Charles providing an exotic, 'foreign' touch, not to mention the translucidly blond German boy whose name escapes me for now. There was change in the air; no more big doors, or even big classrooms, as, as children of the Baby Boom (the now-termed Generation X), our classroom was an overspill hut. We sat in table teams of six, each named after a species of Scottish fauna: ospreys, Golden eagles, pine martens... I have no recollection of what my animal was, but the midge would not have been inappropriate, as, thanks to my illness, I was still small, very thin and pale – 'wan' – and, oh boy, I had wonky eyes. At some point, surgery and eye-drops left me virtually blind for part of each day, so mornings in school passed in a blurry fog of bad handwriting and torment. My retreat into myself began, I was becoming 'different'. I spent what I remember of the year relieved that I was still top in reading, and utterly desperate (and desolate) to earn a coveted Ship Stamp, the maximum accolade for achievement in handwriting above even a red star, as my impaired vision reduced my handwriting to a scribble dependent on pot luck more than on anything else. In fact, as I write, the memories come creeping back, and I recall needing my stern friend Heather to put my hand on the page so the chubby black pencil coincided with the start of each printed line. Rather than that feeling of 'joining in' that my earlier memories bring to me, 'striving' seems to tint this second year. Striving to write like the others, to see like the others. I was shrinking.

And then. In the summer holidays. We moved. To England.

Part two: Your wee bit hill and glen

Immortality for a boy

I met a boy. A refugee. He said to me "Take a picture of our kite!"

His black kite made of rubbish, defiance and imagination flew higher and higher until it shared the cornflower heights with the evening moon.

I took the photograph. The boy laughed and shouted "Now I am immortal!"



He spoke English. I replied. He spoke Arabic. I felt small, locked in my ignorance. Paul translated and the heavy doors opened again. Three people. Football and Spain and where Scotland is. We shared the freedom of words and time, new experience and old.

And far above all prophets and men, the kite flew higher and higher.

Hoping for a sunrise, rather than sunset, a truly breath-taking sunrise.


The sea - in fact, the ocean, is La Mar... she couldn't possibly be El Mar....................

Wee Me
probably around 1968 or 69

Hot pants on high (or A bit more of Wee Me)

Buying our outfits for our first plane journey was a major event. These were the days of Vietnam, and the heady, hippy hangover after the Swinging Sixties (I was certainly into swings in the Sixties. And climbing frames and shutes aka slides. Roundabouts made me dizzy and there was always a risk of getting spun off and skinning your knees). The Beatles had not long gone their separate, long and winding ways, and Engerland swung like a pendulum do. Or did...Apparently.
My mother had decided that the situation called for The In Thing. Mini skirts were passé by now, and anyway, as we were growing girls on a budget, mini skirts were both a question of thrift and inevitability anyway. Besides, by this time, The In Thing was hot pants. Which should probably be hotpants, not hot pants, as the latter would suggest that a spell sitting on a sun-warmed pavement would have done the trick. And I guess The In Thing was actually hotpants or kaftans, but my beautiful, fashion-loving Mummy was adventurous where clothes were concerned, and besides, she didn't have to make the outfits this time, so hotpants it was.
In case you missed out on that particular stage in sartorial history, hotpants were shorts, or perhaps they dreamt of being shorts when they grew up, as they were very, oh but very very short. Glorified knickers, in fact. Not for the saggy-bottomed, that's for sure. And my mother was adamant (and not at all saggy-bottomed): we were going to England, world capital of hip gear and trendiness, encased in The In Thing.

The shop was more psychodelic than a yellow submarine or even a velvet underground, with half-dressed girls trying on fabric wisps and fringes which they pulled from shiny, white-and-gold boxes lined with coloured tissue paper. We had never in our short lives seen anything like it, and my sister and I hid behind a changing-room curtain, mortified with embarrassment and transfixed with fascination at the same time. I wanted a box. My two-year-old sister was happy to blow on the tissue paper and turn it into home-made confetti.
A lady not dissimilar to a triumphant opera-singer deposited a tower of shiny, white-and-gold, multi-coloured tissue-paper-lined boxes on a counter in front of our mother. She swooned. No, she didn't; I made that bit up. We raised the lids and the layers of floaty paper one by one as if a cloud of fairies might escape from within, and peeked inside, somehow terrified. Our mirror-plated hiding place in the changing-room was suddenly filled with glowing chrysanthemums, sugar-bright butterflies, vertiginous spirals, swirling paisleys, and exotic feathers. The fashion show began....

The great day finally came. Mummy had gone south some ten days earlier, to make sure that everything was ready for us in our new home in that scary place with the even scarier, English-foreign name of Maidenhead - good grief, what a name! - and we had been staying at her parents' home. My Magic-Puddings Granny had decked us out following her daughter's instructions to the letter: my sister wore a white, broderie anglaise blouse with short, puffed sleeves, and purple, paisley-patterned hotpants of the type with matching braces that crossed over in the middle of her back. Lederhosen without the front panel -and without the Leder, thankfully. I was truly ahead of my time, kitted out like a premature ABBA girl (the iconic Swedish group would leap sequin-clad onto the scene perhaps two years later), in blue, purple and white hotpants with a peacock-feather print. Over said pants, I wore a matching long dress with hundreds of tiny, fabric-covered buttons reaching halfway down the front, then open, rather like a coat, so that the hotpants were on display underneath. Totally vanguard, darling, totally 'in'. The It Sisters were ready to roll!

Daddy, modestly dressed in suit, tie and raincoat, came to fetch us in a taxi. "A taxi! Wow! Can I sit the wrong way round?" "Me, me!" - my sister was still a woman of few words at this point. Our grandparents, brave and proud, waving us off. "You both look very nice, dears. You will write to us, won't you?" Of course I would! There were still a few things I could do that my oh-so-cute sister couldn't; HA! But I was scared. This was it.
We slid past houses, gardens, shops, with their sad stonework and sadder, faded, grey window displays, a landscape of aging shooting stars whizzing past my nose pressed up against the window of the taxi, ghostly visions distorted by - by what? rain? tears?
Bye bye city, bye bye people, bye bye family, bye bye country. I'm going where the people talk funny. I'm going where nobody knows me.

This had been my world for eight years. A world of snowmen, lochs and Hallowe'en, smir and Santa, mashed neeps and Sunday School, rhododendrons and botanic gardens, great-aunts and fish on Fridays. My school, where we had built an Apollo moonshot from Ski yoghurt pots in July 1969; the dance academy where I had surpassed myself as an unconditionally inept tapdancer; the churches we had gone to to listen to my Reverend Grandpas; my cousins' house with the garden where the Easter Bunny lived; the West Kilbride sweet shop with its two counters, one normal height, one kiddy height for those of us with ha'pennies clutched in our fists and eyes only for chocolate spanners and spongy yellow and pink prawns, sherbet flying saucers and red licorice bootlaces; the Italian ice cream shops which were an integral part of Glasgow life. All this and a myriad of whirling, perfumed, stained-glass memories and emotions prior to that fateful day in the summer of '71, when they dressed me up as a gogo dancer and took me to live in England.